On the wall,"Verhalte dich
ruhig" (Behave yourself quiet). Gisella Pearl, an inmate in BIa described
in her book the situation the prisoners faced. "There was one latrine for
thirty to thirty-two thousand women and we were allowed to use it at only certain
hours of the day. We stood in line to get in to this tiny building, knee deep
in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait
until our turn came and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our
bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which
surrounded us like a cloud."*

What motivates
men and women to treat their fellow humans in this fashion? Places so primitive,
so bereft of human dignity, they are really nothing more than what we offer
cattle, if that. At least we feed our cattle and protect them from disease.
One answer is the SS saw the prisoners as less than human, dehumanized, even
not human, merely insects. There was also a dehumanization of the SS accomplished
by an insurmountable arrogance, one that supplies answers and disregards important
questions, one that believes it has the answer to the riddle of existence. The
prisoners were dehumanozed by brutality, and the SS by ideology.